Travel Guide Pedra De Lume

Pedra de Lume, 3 km east of Espargos and 12 km northeast of Santa Maria, offers a rather strange landscape. The salt industry is now a thing of the past; the island lives, fortunately, more from tourism than from slavery. But the mine of Pedra de Lume, a real hell on earth for the unfortunate people who had to work there, is still a site that attracts the tourist. You can bathe in the brine and you will feel like you are floating effortlessly in the salt water. Just outside the caldera is the village of Pedra Lume. To get to the salt flats, you have to take a path behind the church and follow the larch pylons. The access is through a tunnel dug in 1804 inside the volcano.It was a Portuguese captain, Manuel Martins, who first settled in Pedra de Lume and began the exploitation of salt. Later, the site became a French territory, with a local currency and a border; the organization was modeled on that of the corons of the North. The company Les Salins du Midi ensured the exploitation until the independence of Cape Verde, but the production eventually ceased. Even today, nothing seems to have changed: the tunnel, the rails where the carts full of salt went to the sea, the three barges rusted to the bone that ensured the transshipment of salt on the ships of the high seas, the poles, intact, and the huts called casas Farou, named after the man who built them for the workers. All this gives the whole a curious and sinister connotation.